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Alien: Covenant
My first impression after watching Prometheus was that it felt like a prelude to revelations in the next film. After watching this, I can conclude that neither Prometheus or Covenant are worth the bother. Covenant, though it has a fascinating villain, still fails to provide any answers and ends illogically.
What the Alien franchise has desperately needed is a new type of alien. We know the life cycle of the Xenomorph, so there is no longer any dread in the face of this threat, only momentary shocks due to jump scares. Also, Prometheus was a more interesting movie than Covenant for me because at least there was some nominal change in the plot structure of ‘ship gets a signal and investigates’.
Here’s an idea, Scott: Have a ship with a bunch of competent scientists and soldiers get lost in deep space, crash landing on a planet far from Earth and encountering a threat that is entirely different than the Xenomorphs or the Engineers. It’s pretty simple.
I think a shift in storytelling would make these films better than just making a new threat. Covenant tried to balance action, horror, and the philosophical elements of Prometheus to somewhat lackluster results as the latter two don’t feel nearly as present in the film. If the film had just been scarier and answered a few more questions I would have enjoyed it a lot more than I did.
That it’s not scary is a structural problem though.
Not only is it a structural problem but it’s a problem of the film makers making them seem a lot scarier than they actually were. For me this has to do with them showing the Neomorph and the Proto Xenomorph too often and showed too much of them. I prefer my my Xenomorphs to be obscured by shadows most of the time and not shown in good lighting for most of its screen time. With how good the CGI is they could strike a perfect balance in which we we see it fully and moving super fast in select moments but have it lurk in the shadows most of the time. That would give the future films a truly unnerving feeling that’s akin to Alien.
As I said, there’s negligible mystery in the Xenomorph life cycle, so we’re all just waiting for the hapless redshirts to catch on before they all bite it. We’re not learning along with them the dangers of this threat.
I actually think that the negligible mystery are the engineers as we still don’t know why they created humanity, why they changed their minds when it pertains to destroying humanity, what their civilization was like etc. In terms of the Xenomorph’s origin we have seen considerable strides as we have a fleshy version of the being we all know that is born from a facehugger both of which have acid blood. There are certain things that aren’t there like the bio-mechanical nature of the Xenomorph but we have a prototype so the film succeeds on that front in my eyes.
The other problem is the lack of answers. It’s not that we are given few answers to Prometheus, but that the person who demanded these answers is gone and with them the drive in the story to provide those answers. Therefore, the answers it does provide it provides to the audience and not to the characters in particular, making it explanation heavy while failing to satisfy our desire.
Shaw didn’t need to be in the film to provide us with answers as in the Prologue David says he learned of the Engineers ways. Sure it loses that emotional charge that stems from that primal need in humanity to ascertain the nature of all that surrounds us but as it pertains to giving your audience information about the story it’s more than sufficient. I just wanted more answers period no matter where they came from. I would have been fine with text on the end credits filling me in on whats up with the Engineers rather than being left here in a state of confusion.